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How Leibniz Would Have Responded to the Lisbon Earthquake

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How Leibniz Would Have Responded to the Lisbon Earthquake How Leibniz would have responded to the Lisbon earthquake Lloyd Strickland Introduction: the Lisbon earthquake On 1 November 1755, the city of Lisbon in Portugal was virtually destroyed by the largest documented seismic event ever to hit Europe. At around 9.30 in the morning, the city was shaken by a violent earthquake that occurred in the Atlantic Ocean, around 100 miles south- west of Lisbon (current estimates put it at around 8.5 on the Richter scale). Around forty minutes later, the city was flooded by a tsunami, the first of three. In the areas that stayed dry there broke out numerous fires which raged for five days. The loss of life was huge – some estimates put the death toll at 10,000, others at many times that.1 It was a catastrophe almost of Biblical proportions. As such, it invited speculation as to its theological significance, speculation that was heightened by the fact that, as the event occurred on a religious holiday (All Saint’s Day), many people had died in Church, celebrating mass, while many others had died due to fires that had started on account of fallen altar candles. How did such an event fit into God’s plan? How could such an event fit into God’s plan? Indeed, did God even have a plan? Voltaire was one of the first to ask such questions, in his Poem on the Lisbon disaster, written just days after the event. Voltaire conceded – reluctantly one feels – that God probably did have a plan, but whatever it was, it was incomprehensible to us. This led him to train his fire not on God, but on those philosophers who had attempted to explain and justify not just this particular evil, but all the world’s evils. His first target was what we would today call retributive theodicy, namely the belief that natural disasters are divine punishments distributed according to desert, which he selected on account of the oft-made suggestions that 1 God had sent the earthquake as punishment for the sins of Lisbon’s inhabitants.2 Voltaire responded: Was then more vice in fallen Lisbon found, Than Paris, where voluptuous joys abound? Was less debauchery to London known, Where opulence luxurious holds her throne?3 Further on, Voltaire singles out Leibniz’s justification of God for poetic humiliation: Leibniz can’t tell me from what secret cause In a world governed by the wisest laws, Lasting disorders, woes that never end With our vain pleasures real sufferings blend; Why ill the virtuous with the vicious shares? Why neither good nor bad misfortune spares?4 The central plank of Leibniz’s theodicy is the (in)famous claim that God has created the best of all possible worlds. Although Voltaire says that Leibniz can’t explain the Lisbon earthquake, what he means is that Leibniz’s theodicy doesn’t serve as an acceptable explanation of it. He was not alone in thinking this way. In fact, it would be fair to say that the Lisbon earthquake severely damaged the plausibility not just of Leibniz’s own theodicy, but also of the wider project of theodicy. As one scholar puts it, 2 In spite of all the questionable and even naive assumptions that went into making God’s ways intelligible to man, the efforts of Leibniz, Bishop King, and their many successors seem to have satisfied the eighteenth century’s needs for a good while, at least until the 1755 Lisbon earthquake shattered the rosiest glasses of the time.5 Leibniz died in 1716, several decades before the Lisbon earthquake struck, and so was unable to address it and the challenges thrown up by it, which would have included an account of how the event was consistent with God’s providence, which of course he had sought to uphold. Contemporary scholars are of the view that Leibniz explained natural disasters like Lisbon as nothing more than the unfortunate consequences of the normal workings of simple laws of nature, and that God permits such disasters to happen because it would be unworthy of him to overrule the laws he has established. There certainly is this line of thinking in Leibniz’s writings, but it is far from being the whole story, as we shall see. The aim of this essay, then, is to determine what Leibniz’s response to the Lisbon earthquake would have been, had he lived to know about the event. Earthquakes, simple laws, and metaphysical evil Let us start by asking how Leibniz sought to explain the occurrence of earthquakes. In his volume of Earth history, Protogaea (1691-3), he took them to be the effects of subterranean “tunnels of fire” which extended through the Earth.6 Similar theories abounded at the time; Leibniz’s is a variation of a popular account which held that the air that surged through the subterranean tunnels in the Earth’s crust sometimes became so agitated – because of the heat of the core – that it shook the ground above.7 But of course, when it is a matter of God’s providence, the actual mechanism of earthquakes is really neither here nor there, because the real question is not “what is the 3 natural mechanism of earthquakes” but rather “why would a perfectly good and all-powerful God admit any natural mechanism of earthquakes”? Leibniz nowhere offers a direct answer to that question, as far as I know, though it is straightforward enough to reconstruct what it would have been. Earthquakes are simply the natural effects of our laws of nature operating on the fabric and structure of the Earth, and these laws were selected by God on account of their simplicity, universality, and uniformity. This is certainly the direction of Leibniz’s thinking in the Theodicy (1710), in which he claims that, in the creation and governing of the universe, God would seek to act in the simplest ways, as these best expressed his wisdom and perfect nature.8 The idea was borrowed from Malebranche,9 and like Malebranche, Leibniz thought that the simplicity of God’s ways would be manifested in creation by his opting to act through general volitions rather than by particular volitions.10 When God acts by general volitions, he puts in place general laws of nature at the moment of creation and then abides by them. Conversely, particular volitions are independent of laws and are entirely ad-hoc: they concern a specific time, or specific place, or a specific end. So when God acts by particular volitions, he doesn’t abide by the general laws of nature, but rather overrides these laws in order to bring about a particular effect at a particular time and place. In effect, particular volitions are miracles, being one-off actions by God. Leibniz insists that God always acts through general volitions, and never through particular volitions.11 He also claims that God’s preference for general volitions would lead him not just to instantiate laws of nature, but also laws of a certain kind, namely those that are universal, uniform, and inherently simple, as such laws eliminate the need for superfluous decrees (and thus are more in keeping with wisdom).12 For Leibniz, God’s ways serve as a factor in determining the overall perfection of a possible world; as he explains to Malebranche, “when I consider the work of God, I consider his ways as a part of the work, and the simplicity of the ways joined with fecundity form a 4 part of the excellence of the work.”13 Hence, for Leibniz, the simplicity of God’s ways is a key part of what makes the best possible world the best.14 But Leibniz also notes that simplicity has its price: I believe ... that God can follow a simple, productive, regular plan; but I do not believe that the one which is best and most regular is always convenient for all creatures simultaneously.15 The operation of universal, uniform, simple laws of nature sometimes bring about disorders, such as birth defects, or unfavourable weather, or even natural disasters like earthquakes. These could be prevented if God were to depart from the laws he has established, temporarily suspending them or overriding them in order to prevent the disorder from occurring. But Leibniz was adamant that God should not do this: It is nevertheless right to say that God must not disrupt the simplicity of his ways in order to prevent a monster, a sterility, an injustice.16 The rationale here is obvious enough: if the simplicity of God’s ways is part of what makes our world the best one possible, then disrupting these ways would in fact reduce the overall quality of the world rather than enhance it. Hence if God is committed to producing the best, as Leibniz affirms, then he will not disrupt or override the simplicity of his ways in order to prevent whatever disorders that emerge as a result. It would be correct to say, then, that God does will earthquakes to occur, but only through his general volitions, and not through any particular volition. As Leibniz says: 5 It is true that when one wills a thing, one wills also in some way everything that is necessarily bound up with it, and consequently God cannot will general laws without willing also in some way all the particular effects which must necessarily arise from them. But it is always true that these particular events are not willed for themselves, and that is what is meant by saying that they are not willed by a particular and direct volition.17 On the basis of what we have seen thus far, it seems relatively straightforward to impute to Leibniz the view that God does not directly will earthquakes to occur, i.e.
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